Chrome Meltdown
by The Cheshire Cheese
Summary: The Sprawl's most feared and despised crime lord meets a sudden end, her power stripped in the blink of an eye. Now at the mercy of an entire city she's spent a lifetime burning, Chrome races desperately through a crowd of vengeful men and women racing to her throat. (Tag to "Burning Chrome." Trigger warning for...probably everything you can have a trigger for.)


**A/N: I don't own "Burning Chrome." This is simply a fan's speculation.**

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Chrome spent her entire life working her way out of Hell, and when she realized she had just been plunged back into it her metallic scream echoed across cyberspace. The matrix was still vibrating with the sound when she jacked out, seconds before a dozen different enemies fired their most lethal Black Ice at her computer. Had she lingered only a few seconds longer, she'd have died right there. Less than an hour later, she would wish she had.

It was common, almost expected, for a crime lord's empire to eventually crumble. But had any tyrant's rule in the last century ended so completely so suddenly? Her only warning had been the theft a few days earlier. Some hackers she had still been working to trace, until moments ago. She'd had something special planned for them. Chrome was known for her innovative punishments. Tossing a live man into a waste grinder, drenching a screaming woman in oil before tossing a light match onto her, those were things Chrome did when she was in a hurry, or out of ideas. Her specialty was her poisons: cancers that took years to kill; chemical mixes that disfigured the subject beyond human shape and mobility, while leaving the mind perfectly in-tact; diseases that drove a selected loved one of the condemned to homicidal insanity. Each death, every disfigurement, brought a special kind of stirring in Chrome's chest, the closest thing she could feel to joy. But in truth, that feeling was far more comparable to the rush from a drug addiction.

Chrome was feeling a rush now, and not the good kind. She was taken back to her younger days, sailing through the hardest and most illegal drugs on the street, the "bad trips" they would bring. She would run, back then, through the city, tearing across streets in front of cars, tumbling into alleyways in a blind animal panic, whether or not someone was actually chasing her. Half the time she wouldn't even remember doing it. She was running again, she realized, thundering down the steps of her mansion, bullets ricocheting off the walls. Her own guards had turned on her. Only her inhumanly jacked-up system kept her ahead of the bullets.

With a roar through her custom-implanted teeth, Chrome crashed through a glass door—a feat, once again, made possible by her augmented speed—and tore out into the city. She'd been wearing a silk Chinese robe when she left her computer, and by the time she was running across the street, almost half of it was gone. She felt blood streaming down her face, dampening her short black hair, but thought little of it. Her gray eyes bulged madly in the windshields of cars and hovercrafts that screeched to stop inches from her.

Chrome had never believed the cliché of one's life flashing before their eyes during a near-death experience, yet here it was, in a sense at least. It came out of order, a jumble of hells and triumphs, from her earliest memories to the last moments before seeing her money vanish from the matrix. A six-year-old girl, sold into slavery. A toddler, wandering alone through the darkest trenches of the Sprawl, inhaling a hundred different toxins as she rummaged the trash for something to eat. An argument, screaming and swearing, with a suit who thought women had no place in the biz, ending when she put his stake knife through the center of his throat, the excitement she felt as his blood sprayed her face. Serving her first trick in the whorehouse, at age nine. Listening impassively, as one of her own girls broke down to her, tears rolling down her cheeks, I can't do this anymore Chrome, these dreams, I can't— and Chrome slapping her, hard, and telling her to get back to work. The House of Blue Lights, seeing its sign first light up, her newest and most promising business…

Two things Chrome never ran out of were money and malice. She had none of the former to spare for anyone besides herself, and an infinite amount of the latter for everyone and everything. Her young puppets, whining to her about how "frightening" and "awful" the work was, spoiled brats who'd never once had to be conscious for a trick. Their spoiled children, growing up sheltered and provided for, eating multiple times every day. The pig businessmen who doubted her; the rent-a-cops who got in her way; the mindless sheep who flocked to her House of Blue Lights, the foreign filth that polluted her city, that cunt Tally Isham on TV, the list was endless.

Male laughter filled the alley, and Chrome realized that she was running in place, someone holding her by her arms. They slammed her into the wet brick wall, socked her across the jaw.

"Chrome!" A large pale man with a shaved head leered at her with a mouth of decayed teeth. "You been chargin' an arm and a leg for your whores at the Blue Lights. I say it's time for a free sample!"

Chrome thrust all her energy into her jacked muscles, trying to throw him off, but he was as augmented as she was. They probably all were, a group of four men. His two massive hands squeezed her arms, practically cutting off circulation, and then there was a third hand over her breast, followed by tearing fabric.

Gunshots rang through the air.

The man holding Chrome slackened, a bullet hole leaking from his head. The man ripping her clothes was dead as well, crumbling to his knees. The other two went down within seconds, before they even had their own guns out. Chrome leaned into the wall, heaving, staring at her rescuer. A suit, a middle-aged man of some mixed ethnicity, staring solemnly at Chrome with dark slanted eyes.

"I despise rapists," he said calmly. "It happened to my sister, and I've made it my business to kill every rapist I come across. My associates understand that it's just my policy, how I operate. It's my belief that rape has no business in…business. Nor sexism."

Chrome just continued to heave, wondering what to make of this man. Was he attempting to flatter, suck up, to her? Did he not realize she'd lost all of her power? Was he about to make some kind of an offer, that might save her?

He continued, without changing his tone, "And that is all this is, Chrome. Business." His gun came up, aimed between Chrome's eyes.

Another bang, and the man was suddenly gripping his bleeding hand, gun clattering to the ground. Chrome fired past him, knocking him aside, back onto the street. On the way she heard someone yell at the man, "_She's mine!_"

By now the block was in so much pandemonium that she didn't hear the gunshots that hit her. But she felt them, one in her back, another her leg, and her body refused to keep moving. She stumped, tried to stand back up, failed. Sitting in the middle of a cold metal ramp between skyscrapers, crowd of clueless civilians staring at her, making emergency calls. She ignored them, and began searching frantically for the new bullet holes. Found none. Instead, two darts, like tranquilizers. She felt…different, but not like she was going to pass out.

And then two people were staring down at her, a man and a woman. Dressed like ordinary civilians, or low-class consol cowboys. Both wearing cheap plastic shades and leather jackets. They were both black, with similar complexion and long faces. Relatives, perhaps. They seemed vaguely familiar. She recalled a brother-and-sister team that had tried to rob her, once, but couldn't remember their names or how she'd punished them. They removed their shades, to stare down at her with a level of venom that Chrome rarely saw outside a mirror.

"You remember us, Chrome?" the man asked. "Jade and Jesse Howl?"

The woman, Jade, said coldly, "Remember me, begging you, to punish me, 'stead of my baby?"

And then Chrome remembered. It was a distant memory, an incident that had barely left an impression on her. A young black girl, sobbing over her pregnant belly, please_, please, stop it, wait till my baby's born, then punish _me_! _I_ robbed you, not him… _

The poison didn't kill the child. That would have been lazy, and far too benign. Five-months into healthy development, the baby's skeleton twisted and melted under Chrome's toxin, as did his brain. He would be born a monster, with a consciousness barely above a vegetative state. That was ten or fifteen years ago. If he was _lucky,_ the child was a diaper-case now, babbling baby talk in a daycare amongst children with the lowest-functioning Autism and Down Syndrome. It was highly likely that he couldn't even enjoy that, instead being confined to a hospital room, on some kind of life support.

Jade Howl's lips curled up, into half of a toothy grin. "Darts we shot you with," she lifted her tiny gun. "gonna give you a taste of your own medicine, Chrome."

Her bother added, "But we made a slight adjustment, so your mind won't be affected. We want you to know what's happening."

Chrome could already feel it. A burning in her spine, all of her joints, from her shoulders to her knuckles. She pulled herself up on the ramp's fence, the Howl siblings watching her coldly, the crowd of civilians now fleeing the scene. Was it her imagination, the night playing tricks on her eyes, or were her fingers actually bending and twisting in unnatural angles? Was her back stiffening because her vertebra were fusing together, or because she was simply petrified? She stumbled along the gate, too focused on her terror and her struggle to keep moving to waste any attention on the Howl siblings.

"'Scuse me," a new voice, female, raspy. "You two finished with her?"

"We're done," Jesse Howl's voice, distant and emotionless. "Do what you want, just don't kill her please."

"Oh _hell_ no!" The voice sounded ecstatic, and that made Chrome slip and hit the ground, face-first.

The owner of the new voice was a woman Chrome didn't recognize, but she knew a cancer patient when she saw one. The frail build, the gaunt eyes. And she'd left off her wig, or hat, to make sure Chrome saw her bald head, and got the picture. This was no doubt another business associate who'd crossed Chrome, and paid the price of her specialty.

"Fancy a drink?" the cancer patient asked, unscrewing a bottle.

Chrome shoved herself up from the sidewalk, finally finding the energy in her jacked-up muscles to run, but not fast enough, not before the businesswoman's acid hit her entire upper-left side. Chrome's scream echoed once again, this time clear and human, across the panicking street. Her jacked muscles out-powered her fusing bones, causing them to fracture and break as she ran, like dried clay. She was screaming the whole way, all down the ramp, out of agony and terror and rage.

They would never stop talking, after that night, about the last horrible sight of Chrome. Her melting, bleeding, disfigured body running down the long overhead ramp across State Street, her mouth foaming, eyes rolling wildly, while the city was at a loss to do anything but watch. It was a merciful stroke of luck, for Chrome, that one rent-a-cop in town didn't know who she was—or at least didn't recognize this screaming thing as Chrome—and was therefore capable of pitying her enough to deliver a mercy killing. The hair thin red beam shot out from where the cop stood on a balcony circling the Sterling Corp. Headquarters, cutting across the wide street, hitting her on the first try. He used a steam laser, instantly vaporizing her brain, and leaving her skull to explode. Her body continued running for at least four blocks before in finally collapsed.

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**Well, I might've written both Chrome and her death to be a bit more horrible than Gibson intended. I guess when imagining what frightening things Chrome might have been known for, and how she might've died, there were so many terrifying options from Gibson's universe that I just sort of used them all. **


End file.
